Newest Op-ed piece: Death of a Long-Gun Registry

My piece with Gary Mauser at National Review Online starts this way:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.
Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.
Nice logic, but reality never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.
The statistics speak for themselves. . . . .

New Fox News piece: David Brock, Media Matters and gun control hypocrisy

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

David, say it isn't so!
The news from the Daily Caller website is surprising: David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, had a personal assistant illegally publicly carry a concealed handgun in the District of Columbia in order "to protect Brock from threats.” Few organizations have declared their opposition to gun ownership or concealed carry laws as strongly as Media Matters.
The group's opposition to guns has largely been a “scorched earth” approach, demonizing supporters of gun ownership and concealed handgun laws.
According to Media Matters, laws letting law-abiding citizens carry concealed handguns for protection are "dangerous." They assert these citizens "endanger" police officers and "compromise public safety." And derisively refer to the “cult of victimhood,” where crime victims and defensive gun uses are pointed at to justify gun ownership. They claim that it is a “myth” that concealed handguns reduce crime and label those who disagree “extremist”. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The bad news behind the January jobs report

My newest pieces starts this way:

In January 2009, 11.6 million Americans were out of work and 23 percent of them had been unemployed for more than six months.

Today there are 12.8 million unemployed and 43 percent have been out of a job for more than six months. The average length of unemployment has increased dramatically since even the recovery started. Back in June 2009, “only” 29 percent of the unemployed had been unemployed longer than six months.

The number of unemployed Americans last month fell by 339,000, the fifth largest drop since January 2009. But there was an even much more shockingly large number -- almost 1.2 million additional Americans were classified in January as not being in the labor force (see figure here). Unfortunately, that has been the consistent story that has made this “recovery” unique as more and more Americans have just given up looking for work. . . .